Archives Of Health News Blog From Medicineworld.Org

September 28, 2006, 9:48 PM CT

Pecan Way To Health

A new research study from Loma Linda University (LLU) shows that adding just a handful of pecans to your diet each day may inhibit unwanted oxidation of blood lipids, thus helping reduce the risk of heart disease. Scientists suggest that this positive effect was in part due to the pecan's significant content of vitamin E.

"Plant foods, including pecans, are rich sources of phytochemicals that can have a unique effect on the body," says LLU researcher Ella Haddad, DrPH, associate professor, department of nutrition, School of Public Health.

Pecans contain different forms of vitamin E known as tocopherols which protects fats from oxidation. Pecans are particularly rich in one form of vitamin E gamma tocopherol.

Oxidation of fats in the blood a process akin to rusting is detrimental to health. When the "bad" cholesterol becomes oxidized, it is more likely to build up and result in arteriosclerosis.

These latest research findings on pecan's healthfulness were reported in the latest issue of Nutrition Research, just released this week. They are from the second phase of a research project designed to evaluate the health benefits of pecans, as per Dr. Haddad. She analyzed blood samples from study participants (a total of 23 men and women between the ages of 25 and 55) who ate two diets: one that contained pecans and one that did not. Participants were randomly placed on either the American Heart Association's Step I diet or a pecan-enriched version of the Step I diet. (The pecan-enriched diet was similar to the Step I diet but replaced 20 percent of calories with pecans). After four weeks on one diet, they then switched to the other diet.........

Gene Transfer Using Mutant Form Of Good Cholesterol

Transfer of a gene that produces a mutant form of good cholesterol provides significantly better anti-plaque and anti-inflammation benefits than treatment using the "normal" HDL gene, as per a mouse study conducted by cardiology scientists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and published in the Oct. 3 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Apolipoprotein A-I is a naturally occurring component of normal HDL (high-density lipoprotein), the "good" cholesterol that circulates in the blood stream. Apolipoprotein A-I Milano is a mutant form, which was originally found in a small number of individuals in Italy who appear to be protected from cholesterol-related heart disease. Scientists are studying the possibility of treating vascular inflammation and plaque buildup through the transfer of protective genes.

"There has been uncertainty and controversy about whether apo A-I Milano is a better form of HDL than the "wild type" (regular) apo A-I in terms of protective effect against atherosclerosis and vascular inflammation, which are tied together," said Prediman K. Shah, M.D., director of the Division of Cardiology and the Atherosclerosis Research Center at Cedars-Sinai.

"We used a unique approach to do a head-to-head comparison, which allowed us to conclusively ascertain the differences between the two genes. Our study demonstrated that A-I Milano gene transfer is much more effective in reducing plaque and vascular inflammation than the normal (wild type) form of apo A-I," said Shah, the article's senior author.........

Anti-angiogenesis To Fight Cancer

A researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health has discovered a new part of the complicated mechanism that governs the formation of blood vessels, or angiogenesis.

The finding may help halt tumor growth in cancer patients, says Emery Bresnick, the senior author on the study, a professor of pharmacology and member of the UW-Madison Paul P. Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The research, reported in the Journal of Cell Biology on Sept. 25, is the first to connect a particular nervous-system chemical to the regulation of blood vessels.

Normally, blood vessels form when wounds heal and during menstruation, pregnancy and fetal development. But impaired blood-vessel development and function are also a major cause of blindness, and tumors rely on new blood vessels as they develop.

Like most critical body processes, angiogenesis is tightly controlled by multiple balancing mechanisms. When Bresnick and his colleagues, including postdoctoral fellow Soumen Paul, began the new study, they were not looking into angiogenesis. Instead, they were studying a protein that regulates the maturation of blood cells, and noticed that it turns on a gene that makes a compound called neurokinin-B, or NK-B.

Aware that NK-B affects cells in the nervous system, Bresnick wondered, "Why would a protein involved in blood-cell formation turn on the gene for a compound that is supposedly involved in regulating the nervous system?".........

Largest US Study On HIV Treatment In Women

Tibotec Therapeutics Clinical Affairs, a division of Ortho Biotech Clinical Affairs, LLC, announced recently the initiation of the largest clinical study conducted to date in therapy-experienced adult women with HIV to evaluate gender differences in response to an HIV medication.

GRACE (Gender, Race And Clinical Experience), a multi-center, open-label Phase IIIb trial, will compare gender differences in the efficacy, safety and tolerability of PREZISTA (darunavir) tablets administered with other antiretroviral agents over a 48-week therapy period. The study also will explore racial differences in therapy outcomes.

PREZISTA, co-administered with 100 mg ritonavir (PREZISTA/rtv) and with other antiretroviral agents, is indicated for the therapy of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in antiretroviral therapy-experienced adult patients, such as those with HIV-1 strains resistant to more than one protease inhibitor. PREZISTA received accelerated approval based on the 24-week analysis of HIV viral load and CD4&#43; cell counts from the pooled analysis of the TMC114-C213 (POWER 1) and TMC114-C202 (POWER 2) studies. Longer-term data will be mandatory before the FDA can consider traditional approval for PREZISTA (see the full indication and important safety information below).........

Virulence Of 1918 Influenza Virus

It always puzzled the scientists, why the pandemic flu in 1918 was so rampant and the virus was so virulent.

The first comprehensive analysis of an animal's immune response to the 1918 influenza virus provides new insights into the killer flu, report federally supported researchers in an article appearing online today in the journal Nature. Key among these insights, they observed that the 1918 virus triggers a hyperactive immune response that may contribute to the lethality of the virus. Furthermore, their results suggest that it is the combination of all eight of the 1918 flu virus genes interacting synergistically that accounts for the exceptional virulence of this virus.

Michael G. Katze, Ph.D., of the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, led the research team with University of Washington's John Kash, Ph.D. The work with the fully reconstructed 1918 virus was conducted by coauthor Terrence Tumpey, Ph.D., in a biosafety level 3-enhanced laboratory at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

"Understanding as much as possible about the virus that caused the devastating 1918-1919 influenza pandemic is an urgent imperative as we pursue efforts to prepare for--and possibly thwart--the next flu pandemic," says NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D.........

Finger Length Ratio May Predict Women's Sporting Prowess

The difference between the lengths of a woman's index and ring fingers may indicate her sporting prowess, suggests research published ahead of print in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

The finding supports other research indicating a possible link between this ratio and fertility, vulnerability to serious disease, intellectual ability, certain personality traits, and musical talent.

Most of the sporting research in this area has so far focused exclusively on men.

The scientists base their findings on x ray pictures of the right and left hands of 607 female twins, whose average age was 53. Most were right handed.

The second to fourth finger ratio was calculated by dividing the length of the index (second) finger by that of the (fourth) ring finger.

Study participants were also asked to rank their highest achievement in a wide range of individual and team sports, since the age of 11.

Participation levels were highest for swimming, cycling, tennis and running in descending order.

The association with finger ratio was highest for running, soccer, and tennis. The highest achievement in any sport was strongly associated with a low second to fourth finger ratio. Running ability was especially linked to a low (male pattern) ratio.........

Abortion Notification And Consent

Laws that require minors to notify or get the consent of one or both parents before having an abortion reduce risky sexual behavior among teens, as per a Florida State University law professor in Tallahassee, Fla.

Jonathan Klick, the Jeffrey A. Stoops Professor of Law, and Thomas Stratmann, professor of economics at George Mason University, came to that conclusion after they looked at the rates of gonorrhea among teenage girls as a measure of risky sex in connection to the parental notification or consent laws that were in effect at the time.

The scientists observed that teen gonorrhea rates dropped by an average of 20 percent for Hispanic girls and 12 percent for white girls in states where parental notification laws were in effect. The results were not statistically significant for black girls. The study will be published in an upcoming edition of The Journal of Law Economics and Organization.

"Incentives matter," Klick said. "They matter even in activities as primal as sex, and they matter even among teenagers, who are conventionally believed to be short-sighted. If the expected costs of risky sex are raised, teens will substitute less risky activities such as protected sex or abstinence."

In this case, the incentive for teens is to avoid having to tell their parents about a pregnancy by substituting less risky sex activities. In doing so, the scientists say, the rates of gonorrhea among girls under the age of 20 went down.........

Binge-drinking teenagers

Teenagers who drink alcohol are at higher risk of becoming victims of violence, a Cardiff University study has observed.

A team from the School of Dentistry's Violence Research Group studied drinking habits in children aged 11-16 in England. They found not only a link between drink and aggression but also that children who drank were more likely to be hit, even if they weren't violent themselves.

The scientists are now calling for measures to prevent alcohol misuse to reduce injury risk. Current policy focuses on reducing aggression but this research shows that there should be equal effort to reduce victimisation.

More than 4,000 children were surveyed at 13 schools at four local authorities in the North, the Midlands, London and the South. The study observed that 25% of 11-year-olds were drinking monthly and 3.6% daily, with 12.8% admitting to getting drunk three to five times a year. By the age of 16, 40% were drinking weekly and 6.2% were drinking every day. The research also showed 22.6% of 16-year-olds getting drunk more than 21 times a year.

The study, which has just been reported in the Journal of Adolescence, found a strong link between frequency of drinking and frequency of hitting other people.

However, children who reported drinking monthly were also three times more likely to be hit. Adolescents who drank but didn't get into fights were more likely to be hit than those who did fight.........

Genetic Variations In Parkinson's Disease

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have completed one of the first large-scale studies of the role of common genetic variation in Parkinson's disease (PD). While the results fill in some missing pieces of the genetic puzzle, they are primarily of benefit as a starting point for more detailed studies. The information generated by the study is now publicly available in a database that will serve as a valuable research tool for the future.

The study was led by scientists at the National Institute of Aging (NIA) and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). The data were derived from blood samples of 267 people with PD and 270 neurologically normal individuals. These samples were made available by The NINDS Human Genetics Resource Center at the Coriell Institute (http://ccr.coriell.org/ninds), a publicly-funded bank for human cells, DNA samples, clinical data, and other information that aims to accelerate research on genetics of disorders of the nervous system. Results of the study appear in the September 27, 2006, early online publication of The Lancet Neurology.

"This is, to my knowledge, the first publicly available genotype data of this magnitude outside of the International HapMap effort, and certainly the first disease-linked dataset. I hope that this will prove to be a valuable resource for future genetics work in Parkinson's disease, both for our laboratory and for other scientists around the world," says Andrew Singleton, Ph.D., the NIA researcher who led the study. "The use of neurologically normal controls from the NINDS neurogenetics repository means that these data can be readily used as a control group in future large scale SNP studies performed in a number of other neurological diseases".........

Brain Damage In Early Alzheimer's Disease

Scientists have developed a new computer-aided analysis technique to identify early cellular damage in Alzheimer's disease (AD). The study is featured in the recent issue of Radiology.

"With increasing longevity among the population, the occurence rate of AD is expected to rise rapidly, creating a great burden not only for patients and their families, but also for society," said Min-Ying Su, Ph.D., author and associate professor in the Department of Radiological Sciences & the Tu and Yuen Center for Functional Onco-Imaging at the University of California at Irvine. "Our methods may enable earlier diagnosis of AD, allowing earlier intervention to slow down disease progression," she added.

As AD progresses, cell membranes in the brain may be damaged, allowing water molecules to move throughout the brain more freely. This phenomenon can disrupt neural processes and cause neuron cells to die, leading to brain atrophy. This process of cellular damage causes an increase in the "apparent diffusion coefficient," or ADC, which is a measurement used to study the distribution of water in the brain.

Thirteen elderly patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) were enrolled in Dr. Su's study. Patients with MCI are at high risk for developing AD. These 13 patients and 13 elderly control subjects underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain and performed recall tasks. On MRI images, ADC values were measured in gray- and white-matter regions by using the computer-aided analysis program. Findings were compared between patients and healthy controls.........

Did you know?Studies in monkeys and women suggest that unlike traditional estrogen therapy, a diet high in the natural plant estrogens found in soy does not increase the risk of uterine cancer in postmenopausal women, according to Mark Cline, D.V.M., Ph.D., an associate professor of comparative medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.